Silencing Americans that say things government doesn’t like.
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Posts Tagged ‘Global Engagement Center’
D.O.G.E.: End The Global Engagement Center!
Posted by M. C. on January 8, 2025
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: D.O.G.E., Global Engagement Center | Leave a Comment »
Twitter Files: GEC, New Knowledge, and State-Sponsored Blacklists
Posted by M. C. on March 8, 2023
Americans have been paying taxes to disenfranchise themselves, as government agencies and subcontractors undertake a massive digital blacklisting project
GEC was not conceived as a partisan mechanism to defang conservative media, despite the recent true and damning series of reports by the Washington Examiner, outlining how a GEC-funded NGO in England used algorithmic scoring to de-rank outlets like The Daily Wire and help papers like the New York Times earn more ad revenue.
A new #TwitterFiles thread will be dropping in a few hours, at noon EST. It follows up the Hamilton 68 story of a month ago with examples of state-funded digital blacklisting campaigns run amok. It’s self-explanatory, but some advance context might help:
In 2015-2016, during the brief, forgotten period when Islamic terrorism was fading as a national obsession and Trumpian “domestic extremism” had not yet become one, Barack Obama made a series of decisions that may yet prove devastating to his legacy.
The short version is he signed Executive Order 13271, establishing a “Global Engagement Center” (“GEC”) to “counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations.” This act got almost no press and even within government, almost no one noticed.
In the bigger picture, however, a lame duck president kick-started the process of shifting the national security establishment’s focus from counterterrorism to “disinformation.” Whether by malfunction or design, this abrupt course change of Washington’s contracting supertanker would have dramatic consequences. In fact, the tale of how America’s information warfare mechanism turned inward, against “threats” in our own population, might someday be remembered as the story of our time, with collective panic over “disinfo” defining this generation in much the same way the Red Scare defined the culture of the fifties.
This is a complicated story and it would be a mistake to jump to simplistic conclusions, like that the Global Engagement Center (humorously nicknamed “GECK” or “YUCK” by detractors in other agencies) is an evil Orwellian mind-control scheme. It isn’t. But for a few crucial bad decisions, it could have fulfilled a useful or at least logical mission, much as the United States Information Agency (USIA) once did. However, instead of stressing research and public reports, as the USIA did when responding to Soviet accusations that Americans had caused the AIDS crisis, GEC funded a secret list of contractors and employed a more surreptitious approach to “counter-disinformation,” sending companies like Twitter voluminous reports on foreign “ecosystems” — in practice, blacklists.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Blacklists, GEC, Global Engagement Center, Twitter Files | Leave a Comment »
The Twitter Files: Twitter And The FBI ‘Belly Button’
Posted by M. C. on January 4, 2023
“They also received an astonishing variety of requests from officials asking for individuals they didn’t like to be banned,” Taibbi wrote. “Here, the office for Democrat and House Intel Committee chief Adam Schiff asks Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry.”
https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-twitter-files-twitter-and-the-fbi-belly-button
Journalist Matt Taibbi released the twelfth installment of “The Twitter Files” Tuesday afternoon that documented the relationship between government agencies and the social media platform.
The latest batch of files came roughly an hour after Taibbi released the eleventh installment of “The Twitter Files” which detailed what led up to the Intelligence Community cozying up with Twitter.
“By 2020, Twitter was struggling with the problem of public and private agencies bypassing them and going straight to the media with lists of suspect accounts,” Taibbi wrote. “In February, 2020, as COVID broke out, the Global Engagement Center — a fledgling analytic/intelligence arms of the State Department — went to the media with a report called, ‘Russian Disinformation Apparatus Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Concerns.’”
“The GEC flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria like, ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute,’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA,’” Taibbi wrote. “State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular U.S. ZeroHedge, claiming the episode ‘led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.’ [Zero Hedge] had done reports speculating that the virus had lab origin.”
Taibbi showed examples of how the GEC’s report led to more explosive headlines that helped shape the narrative around the origins of the pandemic during its early days.
Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth even complained that media trying to find ways to tie pandemic mis/disinformation back to Russia was “revelatory of their motivations.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: FBI, GEC, Global Engagement Center, Matt Taibbi, Twitter Files | Leave a Comment »
Is the State Department Funding Attacks on Activists? – LobeLog
Posted by M. C. on June 11, 2019
A rose by any other name is still the government.
https://lobelog.com/is-the-state-department-funding-attacks-on-activists/
Considerable evidence emerged late this week connecting the U.S. State Department to a Twitter account that has engaged in online attacks against human rights organizations, Iranian-American activists, journalists, and others advocating against the escalation of tensions between the United States and Iran. The revelation is raising questions about whether the Trump administration is using federal funds to propagandize in favor of a potential Iran war.
The story began to develop on Thursday, when Sarah Leah Whitson, Human Rights Watch’s executive director for the Middle East and North Africa, flagged a tweet made last month by the “Iran Disinformation Project” (@IranDisinfo):
“This is a US State Department funded account,” Whitson tweeted. Journalist Negar Mortazavi followed up, tweeting, “so the State Department uses taxpayer money to fund online attacks on HRW because the organization is researching the human cost of US sanctions in Iran. Is this even legal?”
That the “Iran Disinformation Project” is State Department-funded is unquestionably true. The organization’s own “About Us” webpage reads as follows (emphasis added):
Iran Disinformation Project exposes and counters the nefarious influence of one of the world’s few remaining totalitarian regimes. Daily in Persian, Arabic and English languages, the initiative brings to light disinformation emanating from the Islamic Republic of Iran via official rhetoric, state propaganda outlets, social media manipulation and more.
We provide near real time counter narratives and truth telling through our social networks as well as longer, investigative reports. Iran Disinformation Project’s documentaries and other video productions, profiles of disinformation nodes and personalities, translations of scholarly works on disinformation and more provide to Iranian, Arab and international audiences an educative perspective on how Ayatollah Khamenei’s theocracy ensures regime survival not only through aggression but also through the soft power of its lies about itself, about Iran and about our world. The regime’s external terror, imperial wars and financial power are a focus, as are its internal repression, corruption and incompetence. Throughout our work, we amplify the voices and civic actions of courageous Iranians who reveal the regime for the evil it truly is.
Iran Disinformation Project was launched in late 2018 and is funded by the US Department of State’s Global Engagement Center.
The target of the project’s April tweet, HRW researcher Tara Sepehri Far, expressed some dismay that the Iran Disinformation Project’s attack on her was at least in part financed with taxpayer money:
Many of us accepted that toxic slandering is part of the cost of being an analyst or doing human rights work in a very polarized climate of the US government’s maximum pressure campaign, but now we realize that part of the slandering is actually being funded by US taxpayers. https://t.co/nIwINQXnLd
— Tara Sepehri Far (@sepehrifar) May 31, 2019
By late Friday, presumably embarrassed by the attention the Iran Disinformation Project was suddenly attracting, the State Department suspended its funding. NPR journalist Michele Keleman reported that the department is requiring “the implementer” to take “necessary steps to ensure that any future activity remains within the agreed scope of work.” But questions remain. What is that “agreed scope of work”? Who is “the implementer” behind the project? How long has the State Department been aware that the project was using public funds to attack, repeatedly, journalists and human rights activists for propagandistic purposes? And perhaps most importantly, did anyone in the Trump administration direct the project to conduct those attacks?…
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‘Due to funding cuts, the Government has supplied us with its very own doctor!’
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Global Engagement Center, HRW, Iran Disinformation Project, State Department | Leave a Comment »
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